The Geometric World of Asterios Polyp

I really enjoyed the way Mazzuchelli integrated a sense of semi-cubist deconstruction of characters.  I think it worked the best when Asterios was arguing with his wife and they were deconstructed down to shapes and Asterios was very geometric and blocky and his wife was more realistically shaded in.  I think this spoke a lot about their character where Asterios was more judgmental and rigid as a person while his wife was quiet and soft spoken.  Throughout the comic it was really easy to understand the mood that you were supposed to get from the panels with the simple color wash David put on it.

I think the little things in this comic really worked to make it a different kind of experience than other comics.  Almost every character had their own font ranging from Asterios' mother's cursive to Hana's tiny cute letters.  And all of the side character that were only in there for a few pages-- like the man who used to work at the car place-- were completely fleshed out.  Asterios overall wasn't really a nice guy, I mean I think he meant well but he got caught up in the fact that he seemed to know TOO much.  I've met some people like this myself and after awhile they can get to be really taxing.  Everyone else was very quirky in terms on every character seemed interesting and had their own likes and dislikes.  They weren't carbon copies of each other or anything.

I actually expected this comic to go a completely different direction from where it went.  I was somehow expecting Asterios to meet his brother or switch places with his brother or something, since Ignazio was the narrator.  I mean the constant nightmares Asterios had were creepy to say the least, but  I think that could've gone somewhere since that was never fully explained.  It's kind of like giving someone half a cookie. I want the whole cookie, not just morsels.

The sudden ending of this comic seriously almost gave me a heart attack.  I realize that the end of the world was eluded to throughout the comic through other characters, especially the man in the cafe, but it seriously threw me off in a bad kind of way.  It's like when you are doing theater improv and someone pulls out a gun in the game and it throws everyone off.  It kind of threw off most of the slow build for the comic and left the reader reeling.  

And another thing I wanted to mention that was a little bit odd was Asterios' design.  I really liked his face design and how his face was basically one curvy swoop, it was super appealing and also reflected his hard nature.  

Buddha and Scott Pilgrim and Millennium Actress

This week I read some Buddha.

A lot of this comic reflected a bunch of motifs I have seen in a most Japanese manga/anime I have watched.  First of all, in a lot of early anime in particular, there is a lot of violence against women and children.  I mean, in this comic a man is whipping a boy and his mother because the goods got stolen.  There was also an episode of Speed Racer where a man was whipping a car and then was whipping his daughter because he didn't want her to ride in Speed's car--and that one got banned in the US.  Secondly, there is no filter.  Everybody regardless of age or gender gets slapped and/or punched.  This is Japan.  They have tentacle porn, shojun, manga, anime, otakus, the works.  I mean I just read a page where these kids peed on this one kid and he punched them all in the gonads.  Sometimes I just question why there are some things in manga and anime, but then I just go with it because you might as well.  

Another interesting thing that the Japanese have in their work is an acute connection with the environment/nature.  In this comic in particular there is the sense of the connection between Tatta and the tiger and other people and their interactions with animals.  This goes way back to the Japanese belief in harmony and zen, they respect nature.  This is different from the Eastern side of this, our side, where we strive to master nature rather than live with it. What I really like about Japanese manga is that people seem to become friends really quickly, it's like once people have a common view they are thick as thieves.  

There are a lot of aspects of Speed Racer in this manga, I mean, they are both Osamu Tezuka, and you can really tell in particular pages 48-49 with the classic stretched torso pose and implied violence from the multiple "BAM"s written across the next page.  One of the kids in this comic looked just like Astro Boy, he almost had the same face and hair, I think his name was Tatta.  This comic in particular has a lot of sound effects for movement.  I was reading one page where there was an army coming in and the entire thing was just: Booms, Snaps, Rumbles, Gallops, and Phoofs.

I've also seen Millennium Actress as well as basically every other film Satoshi Kon has made.  When he died I was seriously heartbroken. I really like Paprika and Perfect Blue better as films because they explore the psyche more and had a lot more of a unique flavor to them: I mean in Paprika you are running around in a circus like dream world where anything goes and Perfect Blue leads you down a rabbit hole where you question the main character's sanity.  I would say Millennium Actress is the tamer of the bunch.  I have only seen this movie once because it was kind of repetitive to me after awhile of always running and searching for someone.  I think this film does give a very good sense of Japan more so than the other two just because there is so much of the things Setsuko Hara that explore the past genres of Japanese history.  And this movie in particular really weaves seamlessly through her past and her present and takes the two interviewers with her.

I've also read all of Scott Pilgrim as well as seen the movie which was actually a really good representation of the book, which I wasn't expecting.  I think the most exciting thing about this comic was that Scott Pilgrim was like one of those 8bit games.  I mean, I am not a gamer myself, but it really had an appeal all to its own because nobody had really done that before.  You get extra lives just like a game, and there are different bosses and it makes sense as you are reading it, it's not jarring at all.  And Scott Pilgrim seemed like a real story about this guy in Canada.  And it's cheeky as hell.  There's a guy with Vegan powers and this comic has probably the best collection of one liners ever.   My favorite line from the comic would have to be

Scott: "What's the website of amazon.ca?" 

Wallace: "Amazon.ca?"

The comic is snarky and sarcastic and it really stands out to me. I don't really read copious amounts of comics on my own because books are more appealing to me.  And at the same time I really don't have time with the amount of coursework as a senior CA, but I made time to read all of the books freshman year because they were so goddamn appealing and fun to read.  

Wide World of Comics

 For this week I read some of Persepolis and some of the Blacksad comics.

I looked forever to find a Blacksad comic online because I saw one panel of it and couldn't take my eyes off of it.  The Blacksad comics were so beautiful to look at in general, the detail given to each panel was just mind boggling, I mean you could see every wine bottle on a shelf and every leaf on each bush.  And I've been to New Orleans and it got to one panel and I recognized the panel as one of the restaurants there that I've seen pictures of.  I really like the range of emotions that the characters had.  It seems in a lot of comics with animals it is either condemned to still movements with little or no exaggeration.  Guarnido really knows how to work his characters to keep it looking lifelike a realistic.
And some of the panels just were simply gorgeous like this one:

Even without any narration or dialogue you understand exactly what is going on, plus you get a sense of this character.  You don't wanna mess with this guy he is dangerous.  And all of the characters in Blacksad were almost all different animals and breeds and every character really used that characterization associated with that animal.  I mean there were cats, ferrets, dogs, bears, horses penguins, goats, and the list goes on.  A lot of research went into this.  Like one panel I was looking at there was a polar bear orator roaring and you just knew that that guys gonna be trouble.  And Blacksad uses his catlike reflexes: he stalks and trails people and remains basically unfazed and aloof the rest of the time.

This comic really reminded me of the web comic Lackadaisy (http://www.lackadaisycats.com/).  They are very alike in terms of detail and characterization.  Plus they both have a very rich sense of environment with Lackadaisy's Jazz Age speakeasies and New Orleans' old wrought iron buildings, which both give each comic a unique old flavor.  And it really does read like one of those dark mystery books, I really enjoyed it.

           Persepolis was an interesting read since there isn't a lot of writing I have found about Iran, especially a comic at that.  I was glad that the comic followed her as a kid because I think otherwise it would be hard for me to understand what was going on since there was such a large political influx going on.  It did give a nice unbiased view: I mean we are seeing this as Marji sees it and it was good to see both views on what is going on and really see what was going on through that war with the common people.
          I really liked her dream sequences where someone would be saying something about her grandpa or something and the next minute in her mind she would see him as a sort of king with a crown and everything. It reminded me alot of Blankets and how that wove in and out of reality.

King Comic

For this week I read King by Ho Che Anderson.

This comic actually reminded me a lot of a movie I saw called the Virgin Suicides because it had a similar type of multiple person narrator.  While it did give an interesting insight to different kind of perspective on things, this type of narration always tripped me up because the way it moves from one person to another.  It's almost like I finally get something to grab onto, and we're onto the next person's thoughts.  I mean, the comic gave you an almost godlike vantage of everything, but at the same time you were left wanting because you didn't know one person's whole belief.  All you have is pieces of everything.  And in King, these opinions were not always positive and a lot of the views weren't what you were expecting.    I mean, the first time you see him in the comic he's trying to steal food. I was like whattt is going onnnnn.  This is just degrading.  It would be degrading to anyone.  It's not the normal picture you would be expected to be painted of Martin Luther King.

The beginning was very in your face.  It was like a bunch of short subjects of people doing crazy things.  My favorite line would have to be "...jungle bunny share-cropping twelve sandwich eating..." because that is just ridiculous.

There were a lot of Christian overtones throughout this comic.  Especially one page where MLK was talking to his wife and there was like a down view of him on his bed and there was like an intense contrast of King looking at the cross with half of his face in shadow and the cross had like intense lighting on it so it almost looked threatening.  It reminded me of that famous picture of the two people who were sharecroppers with the cross in the background, the American Gothic.

Most of the non-African Americans in this book were not really shown in the best light, for lack of a better word.  I mean, what was it--the second page where there were a bunch of hoodlums yelling about Chinks and something else.  It kind of took the idea of the racist Southern person of the time and ramped it up 100%.  I think the page with the old lady on the bus who says hello to the driver and angrily mutters niggers to all the black people in the back was a good example of that.  It's still true today as well my grandma thinks black people are lazy and don't do anything even after all these years.